Day 691

Late breaking news last night pointed out to me the very tough job Robert Mueller has and how life imitates art and vice versa.

Back in the days of black and white TV there was a show called “The Outer Limits.” It conceptually ripped off the much better Sci-Fi show called “The Twilight Zone,” and because of that I rarely watched it. However, there was one episode that was very clever and I remember to this day. It starred Andy Devine who had the best and most outrageous kids/adult Saturday morning TV show. According to Imdb the episode was called “Hocus-Pocus and Frisby” and the teleplay was written by Rod Sterling, creator of the Twilight Zone! (No wonder it was so good.) The Imdb write up says, “A rural gas station attendant given to telling tall tales about himself is kidnapped by aliens who believe him to be one of Earth’s leading intellects.”

Exactly right. So Andy as Somerset Frisby has been telling tall tales all his life. The aliens have been monitoring the humans and take what he says as true and therefore decide to take him back to their planet because he’s the most accomplished human they have studied. They abduct him. He’s in their space craft about to blast off when Frisby pulls out his harmonica and starts playing it. The music drives the aliens crazy. They can’t stand it and Frisby escapes. The space ship takes off and our rural hero walks back into town to be greeted by a huge birthday celebration. He says to them, “You aren’t going to believe this but …”

They all laugh, slap him on the back, and say that story is the best one yet.

So now we have a bunch of little tidbits that seem to be related and we have a block buster piece of evidence that shows the Trump campaign was colluding. But here is Mueller’s problem, the one I think he has been working on for some time – “How do you figure out what is true and what is not when you are dealing with serial liars?”

Imagine the case with Somerset Frisby was one of a crime and you as the prosecutor had to depend on what he said to convict whomever was guilty.

Okay, so here we are. Drum roll please. Let’s introduce the cast of characters and the parts they play, the actions they have taken, and the things they’ve said (and not said, and denied …):

Jerome Corsi – a man who makes his living by alleging that we didn’t land on the moon, that Barrack Obama was not born in this country, and the list goes on and on. He is politely referred to as a conspiracy theorist.

Roger Stone – a Republican political hack and liar who is friends with Donald Trump, the madam of a new York sex ring and scandal and, my favorite, a former rising star in the party until it was discovered he published pictures of himself advertising in a swingers magazine.

Julian Assange – Wikileaks founder, who sold out to the Russians turning over the digital keys to his kingdom to them. He’s been holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for years avoiding prosecution. He dumped a lot of DNC emails just before the election. It is known that he got the emails from the Russian military intelligence unit the GRU. (The most amazing thing about the dump of the emails was how bland they actually were. There was no dirt. It was all routine kind of political stuff that any political campaign might have, yet here we are still talking about them as if there was something nefarious in them.)

Paul Manafort – Campaign manager for Donald Trump; friend, business associate, and political pal of Roger Stone. Paul has run a number of slimy campaigns for the dictator of Ukraine. He has been shown to have laundered money from said dictator and others. He is also in hock to at least one Russian oligarch tied to Putin, and is currently in jail facing sentencing on a bunch of tax evasion, and false financial claims. He agreed to a plea deal with Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel office.

Okay so what happened yesterday?

Robert Mueller has said Paul Manafort broke the terms of his plea deal and therefore the deal is withdrawn. The reason? Lying.

James Corsi was given a plea deal which he says he turned down. That paperwork got released to the press.

The Guardian in London reported that Paul Manafort met with Julian Assange in London at the Ecuadorian Embassy shortly before the release of any emails.

Furthermore, there is evidence that Corsi was asked by Stone to find out what emails Assange had. Corsi got a local London guy to make the inquiry and fed that information back to Corsi who told Stone who told Manafort who told Trump.

Naturally, everybody denies everything.

Imagine if you are Mueller and you have to figure out if the liars are telling the truth?

If this all turns out to be true then we have the first definite link between the Russians and the Trump campaign. The above chain of who told who is subject to speculation on my part as you get further down the list to Trump, but it seems hard to believe that if Manafort knew something that he didn’t tell Trump.

Why?

Well besides the logic there is also Manafort’s reputation and manner. Manafort liked to boast about his connections, about what he could do, who he knew. One person on the other day said he had a meeting with Manafort and it was the most surreal meeting he had ever had, because of this “I know a guy” stuff. The “guys” he mentioned were these dictators in Eastern Europe. The fellow reporting this said it felt like he was in a meeting with a mob boss and he couldn’t get away fast enough.

It turns out that the probable reason Manafort was booted out of the cooperating witness agreement was that he was reporting what he knew to Trump. It would explain how Giuliani knew so many little details of the Mueller investigation. So Manafort was then being a double agent: acting like a cooperating witness to Mueller, yet working for Trump with the possibility of getting a pardon.

These are not normal times. Some make the mistake of thinking that we are and that things will go the way they should or are supposed to, don’t be fooled this is an international criminal conspiracy that will test our democratic principles to their core.

900 Days to Go

Oh yeah, surprise, the racist won in Mississippi, just what we need in the Senate.